I have been experiencing some distortion on vocals played directly from CDs played on my Audiolab8200. However, when the offending CDs are ripped to FLAC files and played in Foobar2000 on my netbook into the Audiolab DACs and my valve amps etc the distortion is reduced. If I use something called a 'hard -6dB limiter' in Foobar the distortion is completely removed. I'm delighted but wonder if someone could explain, in relatively simple terms, what this limiter does.

I have played with the Foobar equalizer by cutting the high frequencies but this does not work as well as the limiter. Does it perform some form of compression or reduce clipping of peaks?